Three Thursday Thoughts on Teaching: 1. Lexical Analysis

Dexter Perkins, Department of Geology and Geological Engineering, University of North Dakota

Lexical analysis is a tool used by computer scientists to analyze code by reducing it to tokens equivalent to specific blocks of text. These blocks can be analyzed to find out how important they are (how often they occur), and what the connections are between them – thus providing guidance to software developers and engineers. A lesser used application of lexical analysis involves analysis of text.

Data bases, articles, blogs, syllabi . . . whatever . . . can be analyzed to see which words and phrases are present and how they are related. So, lexical analysis is a tool that may be useful in linguistics, and could conceivable reveal interesting information about authors, teachers and bloggers. As best I can tell, however, this kind of application is done mostly for fun – although I have not broken into the linguistics research to make sure.

A friend of mine decided to try using lexical analysis to look at his evolution as a teacher. Perhaps, he says, it can tell us something about student learning as well. To start in this direction he created Wordle images (http://www.wordle.net/) of his syllabi for his introductory geology course, comparing 1997 and 2009. The results are below, and I bet you can figure out which one is which! The question, he asks, is whether this or other applications of lexical analysis might be useful for faculty development or in some other way to analyze teaching and learning. What do you think – aside from the fact that the graphics are pretty?